Chapter 13

The Development of Psychoanalysis

  • Freud believes in three great shocks to the collective human ego:

    • Copernicus: Earth is not the center of the universe

    • Darwin: the theory of evolution

    • Freud: the influence of unconscious forces

  • Psychoanalysis was distinct from mainstream psychological thought in goals, subject matter, and methods

Antecedent Influences on Psychoanalysis

  • Philosophical speculations about unconscious psychological phenomena

    • Monadology: Leibnitz’s thoeyr of psychic entities, called monads, which are similar to perceptions

    • Johann Friedrich Herbart: theorizing of a threshold of consciousness, conflict develops among ideas

  • More humane treatments:

    • Reforms in the treatment of mental illness

    • Psychiatrists were divided into two camps: the somatic and the psychic

    • The Emmanuel movement: offered talk therapy session for the mentally ill

    • Hypnosis: is used as a therapeutic the technique

    • Physicians began to think in terms of curing emotional disturbances by treating the mind instead of the body

  • Evolutionary theory:

    • Freud’s thinking had been strongly influenced by Darwin’s writings

    • Darwin’s writings include: unconscious mental processes and conflicts, the significance of dreams, the hidden symbolism of certain behaviors, and the importance of sexual arousal

    • Freud’s theory of child development influenced by Darwin’s material about mental evolution in humans and animals

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the Development of Psychoanalysis

  • Freud’s adult personality characteristics: self-confidence, ambition, desire for achievement, and dreams of glory and fame

  • Demonstrated considerable intellectual ability

  • Freud experimented with the drug cocaine, which he believed to be a medicinal cure to ailments

The Case of Ana O

  • Ana O

    • Patient of Josef Breuer; discussed case with Freud

    • Suffered from sever hysterical complaints that including paralysis, memory loss, mental deterioration, nausea, and disturbances of vision and speech

    • Symptoms first appeared when she was nursing her dying father

    • During hypnosis: while hypnotized she would recall specific experiences that seemed to have given rise to certain symptoms

The Sexual Basis of Neurosis

  • Freud observed Charcot’s use of hypnosis to treat hysteria

  • Adopted Breuer’s methods of hypnosis and catharsis to treat his patients

  • Also used free association: a psychotherapeutic technique in which the patient says whatever comes to mind

    • Freud found that his patients’ memories reached back to childhood; many of the repressed experiences they recalled concerned sexual

Studies of Hysteria

  • The book considered to mark the formal beginning of psychoanalysis

    • Freud’ convinced that sex was the sole cause of neurotic behavior

  • The childhood “seduction” theory

    • Freud believed most of his women patients reported traumatic sexual experiences in childhood, often involving family members

    • Later revised to suggest that the childhood seduction experiences his patients described were not real; they had not actually happened

Dream Analysis

  • Freud had a positivist belief that everything had a cause, including dreams

  • Freud attempts to analyze himself, yet cannot do so using free association

  • Dream analysis: a psychotherapeutic technique involving the interpretation of dreams to uncover unconscious conflict

The Pinnacle of Success

  • Freudian slip: an act of forgetting or a lapse in speech that reflects unconscious motives or anxieties

  • Based on Freud’s suggestion that unconscious ideas are struggling for expression and affect our thoughts and actions

  • 1900-1910: Freud’s status improved

  • 1920s: Freud’s fame peaks

Psychoanalysis as a Method of Treatment

  • Goal of therapy: wean patients from this childlike dependency on the therapist and help them assume an adult role in their lives

  • Primary concern was not to cure people but to explain the dynamics of human behavior

  • Patients often react in different ways:

    • Resistance

    • Repression

Psychoanalysis as a System of Personality

  • Instincts: mental representations of internal stimuli that motivate personality and behavior

    • Life instinct (libido)

    • Death instinct: desire to destroy or hurt others

  • Levels of personality:

    • Conscious vs. unconscious

    • Id

    • Ego

    • Superego

  • Anxiety: functions as a warning that the ego is being threatened

    • Defense mechanisms: behaviors that represent unconscious denials or distortions of reality but which are adopted to protect the ego against anxiety

  • Psychosexual stages of personality development: the developmental stages of childhood centering on erogenous zones

Mechanism and Determinism in Freud’s System

  • Freud influenced by mechanistic ideas:

    • All mental events, even dreams, are predetermined

    • Nothing occurs by chance or free will

  • Psychology’s aim: “represent [mental] processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material

Relations Between Psychoanalysis and Psychology

  • Psychoanalysis very different from academic psychology

  • 1930s-1940s: psychoanalysis captured public attention

  • Popularity of psychoanalysis brings criticism from psychology

    • Psychologists declared psychoanalysis was inferior to a psychology based on experimentation